Highway to Hell (14 page)

Zeke reined in at the top of a rise; the land ebbed and flowed gently, but you couldn't tell until you were actually riding it. Like an ocean, it seemed to stretch on and on, until it faded into the blue-gray haze of the horizon.

“There you go,” he said. “The Wild Horse Desert.”

There was a stark kind of beauty to the place—the bleached tan of the ground and the dark umber of the shrub oaks and mesquite. Cacti bloomed with bright yellow flowers, and the irrigated places—cotton fields, stock ponds—were
sparse but vibrant green. And everywhere was scattered the dark red of the cattle.

“It's kind of gorgeous, isn't it.”

“Yeah. My great-great-grandfather saw the potential here. Got to know it pretty well while he was gun-running up the Rio Grande during the Civil War.” Zeke flashed that grin. “We weren't always such a reputable lot.”

“I'm not convinced you're reputable now,” Lisa drawled, too sardonic to be flirting.
Lisa
and
flirting—
there were two words that had never shared a sentence before.

Easing my right foot out of the stirrup, I tried to straighten my knee, expecting to creak like the Tin Man. From the waist up, I was getting more comfortable with Sassy. From the waist down was a different story.

The horse shifted, maybe smelling the stock pond that I could see about a hundred yards away. “How come some of the ponds have windmills and some don't?” I asked. “Is there electricity run out here?”

“No.” Zeke followed my line of sight. “Depends on the well, and the water pressure underground. The reservoir under the ranch has mostly artesian wells—ones that don't need a pump.”

“That's how the Artesian Manor got its name?”

“Right. The artesian springs used to be a novelty. The hotel was built by a land developer who used them as a selling point, trying to get people from back east to buy land here.”

Lisa scanned the empty horizon with an arched brow. “I can see how well that worked.”

Zeke grinned. “Actually, he was moderately successful
before a hurricane wiped out half the town.” He nudged his horse with his heels and it ambled forward. “Ready to go?”

Lisa clicked her tongue, and her mare started walking. Sassy fell in alongside, trying to get her nose in front. “So, between hurricanes, desert, and drought, why would anyone settle here?” I asked.

“See that cactus?” Zeke pointed to a plant with broad, fat sections covered in spines. “When you boil it down, it makes great feed for cattle. This place was full of untapped resources when my great-great-granddad bought it.”

We were passing an oil pump—a contraption that looked like it had a horse head bobbing up and down on one end as cranks turned on the other. “And plenty of tapped ones,” Lisa added.

Zeke's smile turned rueful. “Yeah, that, too.”

“So if that's an oil well,” Lisa said, pointing to the nodding pump, “then what's that thing?”

She indicated an arrangement of pipes sticking out of the ground like a metal cactus, but covered with spools and plumbing fixtures. Zeke answered, “It's also a well. Just like with the water, how you get oil out depends on how much pressure is in the reservoir. Sometimes you need a pump, like one of those nodding donkeys.” He gestured to the horse-head contraption. “And where the pressure is higher, you just need to control the flow into the pipeline. If you don't control the pressure, you could have a seep or a gusher.”

“A gusher would be bad, right?”

“Thousands of gallons of petroleum lost,” said Zeke. “Or worse, it could catch on fire. And that would be very bad.”

“How do you know so much about this?” I asked.

He laughed. “It's genetic. Cattle and oil. That's what Texas is about, little lady.”

“Please,” said Lisa, letting her horse speed up. “You round up cattle with a helicopter.”

I protested. “You're ruining my mental image. I'm already disappointed that Zeke doesn't wear a six-gallon hat.”

“Ten-gallon hat,” he corrected.

“Whatever.”

“You mean six-shooter, maybe.” Zeke spoke conversationally, to the rhythm of the horses. “I don't wear one of those, either.”

I pointed at the pistol in the leather holster attached to his saddle. “You're packing something.” I'd done an article on gun-control legislation for the school paper, so I could tell a revolver from a semiautomatic from a machine gun, and that was about it.

He shrugged. “It's a little big for snakes and vermin, but you never know what you'll find out here.”

For the record, I'm pro–gun control. The way I see it, if someone has a problem that can't wait for a background check, they're the last person who needs to be armed. And the only reason you'd need an automatic weapon for hunting is if you expected to get attacked by a battalion of mule deer. But if I lived where snakes and vermin might mosey up to my front door, I'd beat a quick path to Big Bob's Guns and Ammo.

Zeke nodded to the stock pond. “Let's give the horses a drink and then head back. Up for a canter, Lisa?”

“Sure,” said pod person Lisa. “Maggie? You okay to follow at a walk?”

“No problem.” As if I didn't feel like a third wheel before. “Don't let me hold you up or anything.”

“Hold your horse,” said Zeke.

“What?”

Before he could explain, Lisa gave her mare a jab with her heels and leapt across the dune. Zeke and his gelding were off a second later. Sassy wasn't happy to be left behind, and I had to put my crash course in riding to the test, sitting back in the saddle and flexing my legs as I held her back.

I watched the two riders crossing the pasture at a gentle lope, puffs of dirt rising from the dry ground with each thud of their horses' hoofs. The afternoon light painted everything in stark colors, and the air smelled of sun and salt and sweat.

“Are you going to behave?” I asked Sassy, my voice as stern as I could make it. She tossed her head, then dropped it and settled into a sulk. “We might as well start our walk.”

As soon as I slackened the reins and shifted my weight, she started forward, dragging her hoofs through the sand. I nudged her into a normal walk, gritted my teeth against the pain forming where my butt met the hard leather of the saddle, and turned my thoughts to Doña Isabel.

I pictured her in the portrait, young and willowy, posed with Sarsaparilla's great-granddam, or however many greats made fifty years in horse generations. What must it have been like to be a woman in the fifties—a young widow with two babies—and in charge of all this land? No wonder she had a will of iron.

Sassy changed gaits, and I adjusted my weight without thinking, taking the impact of the trot with my knees and thighs as if I'd been doing it all my life.

But Doña Isabel's connection to the land wasn't just about being its worldly heir. It was a bond of guardianship. That was how she spoke of it, and how I saw her in my dream.

That said, if she was psychic like me, why had she dreamed of me and Lisa but not of the red-eyed creature that I'd seen? She seemed to know about the livestock deaths, even if Zeke thought he was sheltering her. And what was up with that? Didn't he think she could handle it? Even without the mojo, Doña Isabel was obviously a woman to be reckoned with.

Then I ran out of questions, and realized Sassy and I were almost at the watering hole. I
also
realized that I was now riding at a gentle canter, moving in synch with the horse.

My body tensed, breaking the rhythm, and I started bouncing around in the saddle like a paddleball. Sassy reacted immediately to my alarm; maybe she'd fallen into the same trance I had, thinking about her mistress. She bolted from a canter into a gallop, as if trying to outrun the stranger on her back.

My legs clamped to the mare's ribs and my fingers knotted in her mane, which only made things worse. I remembered Lupe telling me to stay relaxed. Unfortunately, trapped and “relaxed” on a runaway horse, I was getting a big 4,04 error. The only thing accessible was panic.

The desert whipped by in the corner of my eye, a merry-go-round blur. It hurt to hold on, but hitting the ground would hurt even more.

What would Doña Isabel do?
Think
, Maggie.

No, wait. It wasn't thinking that got me into this. I'd been doing fine going on instinct. Use the Force, Maggie.

I reached down with my right hand and grabbed the reins low near the bridle. The scarred tissue in my wrist sent lightning bolts of pain up my arm, but I clenched my fingers and pulled hard to the side. The steady pressure drew the mare's head around, and where the head went, the horse had to follow.

Sassy spun on her own axis, and I felt myself coming up out of the saddle. Pressing my foot into the stirrup, I rode it out—one turn, two, slowing like a top. Finally she stopped, and gave a whole body shudder, like a car that clanks and sputters after you turn off the ignition. I unlocked my fingers from the rein, cradled my aching arm against my chest, and let myself breathe again.

There were flecks of white foam on Sassy's chest, and her coat was now more the color of coffee than root beer. Perspiration soaked my bra and trickled down my back, and the pain in my arm had progressed to burning numbness when I flexed my fingers. But I would recover.

“It's okay, girl.” I leaned forward to stroke her neck with my left hand, which was shaking almost as much as my right. “We're okay.”

She blew out a breath and dipped her head. We had come out of warp speed in a maze of mesquite trees. The mad rush had turned my sense of direction upside down. Everything looked bewilderingly familiar; the scrubby trees were identical to the ones I'd seen on the entire ride. The cacti looked the same, the cows on the horizon looked the same. It was a flat, open canvas of dry desolation.

Where were Zeke and Lisa? They must have seen me galloping past the watering hole. Zeke, at least, was an
experienced rider and should have been hard on our heels. But there was no sign of either of them. Just like on the highway, I felt as though I'd slipped out of time and space. Me and Sassy, and my Spidey sense going off like an alarm clock on finals day.

The horse stood stiff-legged and trembling, and I realized it wasn't just the crazy gallop that had her wound tight as a bowstring. A carrion wind stirred the leaves of the mesquite and eddied sand around the horse's hoofs. The stink of death and decay.

The smell came from where the land rose slightly, hiding what lay on the other side of the rise. I tugged on the reins, but Sassy rolled her eyes and didn't budge. Her meaning was clear: if I was crazy enough to check out the stink, I was going to have to do it without her.

First I had to dismount without landing on my ass. You would think that going down would be easier than going up, but no. I swung my right leg over the horse, clung to the saddle like a life preserver while I worked my left foot free of the stirrup, then dropped down. My legs trembled as if I'd climbed to the top of the Empire State Building, but I stayed on my feet.

I staggered up the rise. Beyond it, the ground dropped away into a drought-empty pond, nothing but cracked earth at the bottom. That, and what once had been a cow and her calf. I think.

Both carcasses were covered with a carpet of fat black flies. Two turkey vultures flapped back at my approach, but they were too brazen, or too full, to take off. Other scavengers had been there, also, and left bloody pieces of the calf
scattered, like messy children with their toys. The cow's red-brown hide had been torn in huge gashes. Dark slimy things spilled out, soaking the ground and turning the bed of the empty pond to mud.

The putrid stink was so heavy that I almost missed the other smell, a rotten-egg odor that was barely perceptible, like the top note of a sick perfume. The buzzing of the flies was as thick as radio static. One of the vultures hopped forward to pluck out the cow's eyeball with a soft, wet pop, and my skin went prickly hot with nausea.

I took short, shallow breaths through my mouth, the refrain of don't-puke-don't-puke-don't-puke running through my head, covering all sound until a gunshot split the air. I jumped, the stab of adrenaline like a splash of icy water. The vultures lumbered into the sky with a rustle of greasy black feathers as Zeke lowered the pistol he'd just fired.

He stared at the carnage in the dry pond, his nostrils pinched, white lines of tension around his mouth. Lisa came up the rise after him, and stopped when she saw what lay below. “Oh my God.”

I shuddered. There was nothing godly about this. Nothing natural, no circle of life. Something very
bad
had done this.

That certainty made me turn to Zeke more fiercely than was tactical. “You can't tell me
this
was done by a coyote.”

“Who knows, after the scavengers have been at the bodies?” He ran a shaking hand through his short hair. “Maybe a cougar has come back into the area. Or a wolf. They're notorious cattle killers out in Yellowstone.”

“Come on.” Frustration—not to mention freak-out—had cut short my temper. “What are the chances of that?”

“Better than the chance it's some kind of fairy-tale monster,” Zeke snapped, color coming back to his face.

“Bogeymen—
stories
of bogeymen,” I edited, trying not to alienate him completely, “they've always been around, Zeke. Only the names change. Maybe the tales are based on something. This kind of carnage, and that smell, like rotten eggs…”

Zeke pointed across the carnage in the pond, to a horse-head pump, placidly nodding up and down. “The smell is hydrogen sulfide—impurities in the gas coming from an oil well. It's sure as hell not the breath of
el chupacabra.
”

“I'm not saying it is—”

But he had a full head of steam now. “You can smell the wells all over, even when you don't see them. Stinking oil wells and real, live animals that have eyes that reflect the light. That's all. The rest is superstitious bullshit.”

I simmered,
so
tempted to tell him what I knew about superstitious bullshit, that a legendary animal would be the
least
weird thing I'd seen. After what I'd been through in the last year, I would be
relieved
if we were dealing with an alien space pet.